Stop and Frisk. Racial profiling plain and simple.
Hopefully, this racist police tactic will end once Bloomberg leaves office.
Think about it. How would you feel if you were stopped and searched just because of the color of your skin.
12 Years a Slave ... an excellent movie that should be required viewing by every cop in every precinct in New York City.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
Monday, October 8, 2012
Romney's 'Ideas'
Romney has lots of ideas ...
His first idea was to say he's cutting millionaires' taxes from 35% to 28%; his next idea is to say that he isn't going to do that!
Another idea was to get rid of the pre-existing condition requirement. Then he said he wasn't. Then his campaign clarified that yes, he was getting rid of that.
LOL!!!
Flip-flop ... this plutocrat changes his platform quicker than a bicyclist changing a flat tire in the Tour de France!
His first idea was to say he's cutting millionaires' taxes from 35% to 28%; his next idea is to say that he isn't going to do that!
Another idea was to get rid of the pre-existing condition requirement. Then he said he wasn't. Then his campaign clarified that yes, he was getting rid of that.
LOL!!!
Flip-flop ... this plutocrat changes his platform quicker than a bicyclist changing a flat tire in the Tour de France!
Romney's lies on Medicare
Romney's debate performance contained more lies and deceptions than just those relating to his tax plan. His assertion that Medicare is being sacrificed for Obamacare is patently untrue. First of all, Ryan included the same cuts to providers in the budget he wrote, Romney endorsed, and every Republican in the House voted for. Second, hospitals now collect only 38 cents on the dollar for services rendered to the unisured. For the most recent year figures are available, that is a loss of 86 billion dollars. Since Obamacare would reduce the number of uninsured by 60% or more, hospitals would not incur 10s of billions of dollars in yearly losses due to the uninsured. That is why the hospitals negotialed with the administration and agreed to pass some of those savings onto the governement through reduced Medicare reimbursement rates. Those reducted rates do not affect benefits and actully extend the life of Medicare by 8 years. Also, some of this money is being used to close the Medicare prescription doughnut hole. Just another cyncial deception and fear tactic from Romney.
I Burn Paris by Bruno Jasienski
I Burn Paris
by Bruno Jasieński
translated from the Polish
by Soren A. Gauger & Marcin Piekoszewski
I Burn Paris has remained one of Poland's most uncomfortable masterstrokes of literature since its initial and controversial serialization by Henri Barbusse in 1928 in L'Humanité (for which Jasienski was deported for disseminating subversive literature). It tells the story of a disgruntled factory worker who, finding himself on the streets, takes the opportunity to poison Paris's water supply. With the deaths piling up, we encounter Chinese communists, rabbis, disillusioned scientists, embittered Russian émigrés, French communards and royalists, American millionaires and a host of others as the city sections off into ethnic enclaves and everyone plots their route of escape. At the heart of the cosmopolitan city is a deep-rooted xenophobia and hatred — the one thread that binds all these groups together. As Paris is brought to ruin, Jasienski issues a rallying cry to the downtrodden of the world, mixing strains of "The Internationale" with a broadcast of popular music.
With its montage strategies reminiscent of early avant-garde cinema and fist-to-the-gut metaphors, I Burn Paris has lost none of its vitality and vigor. Ruthlessly dissecting various utopian fantasies, Jasienski is out to disorient, and he has a seemingly limitless ability to transform the Parisian landscape into the product of disease-addled minds. An exquisite example of literary Futurism and Catastrophism, the novel presents a filthy, degenerated world where factories and machines have replaced the human and economic relationships have turned just about everyone into a prostitute. Yet rather than cliché and simplistic propaganda, there is an immediacy to the writing, and the modern metropolis is starkly depicted as only superficially cosmopolitan, as hostile and animalistic at its core.
--------
Soren Gauger on Bruno Jasieński
As we speak, one of the few objects in Poland commemorating the life and work of Bruno Jasieński – a high school that bore his name in his hometown of Klimantów – has officially undergone a name change, on the grounds that the writer in question is not "an authority for today's youth" and, indeed, has a "demoralizing effect" on their young minds. Leaving aside the question of the desirability of judging literature on such criteria, what seems most astonishing is that, even now, over seventy years after his torture and execution in a Soviet prison, Jasieński is still such a socially awkward commodity, certain to make English-speaking readers as uncomfortable as Polish ones. Most of the greatest writers seem to have been born at the wrong time, but only a small handful of the truly odd ones feel as though they wouldn't be quite at home – or embraced – at any time.
Bruno Jasieński arrived in Paris in the fall of 1925. In his last surviving statement for the Russian NKVD before his execution, he listed three reasons for leaving Poland: (1) he had graduated from university and was due to serve twenty months of mandatory military service, (2) he was being sued for alleged blasphemy during one of his poetry readings in Lwów (today Lviv, Ukraine), which could have resulted in a year or two in prison, and (3) he was an unemployed literature graduate whose scandalous reputation scarcely promised him work as a high-school teacher. Difficult as it may be to imagine from today's perspective, his poetry readings had been banned by the police in many Polish cities, and on one occasion an audience had even stoned him for his work.
Jasieński intended to learn French and to write novels in his new language. Instead, he immediately enrolled in Chinese and Japanese classes, and wrote freelance articles for the Wiek Nowy newspaper in Lwów. Among other events, he covered the exhumation of famous Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki's remains in Paris and their shipment back to Poland. He also worked as a director at the Polish Workers' Theater, where he staged an adaptation of one of his own poems.
The decision to write I Burn Paris is immortalized in Aleksander Wat's conversations with Czesław Miłosz (My Century):
Wat: [Jasieński's] communism became absolute because of I Burn Paris, with that quarrel over I Burn Paris, when the French authorities expelled him and raised a fuss. I saw how I Burn Paris came about, through his ignorance of the French language. It was like this: Jasieński returned home, I was having dinner at his place, and he started saying with incredible passion and fury that he had seen Morand's latest book in the bookstore, Je brule Moscou. And he was enraged, pacing round the apartment, cursing, unable to calm himself, that Moscow, which he had just... That crook, that fascist...
Miłosz: He didn't understand that bruler means something different: to drive through quickly?
Wat: And three or four days later he was telling me the plot of a novel he wanted to write: Je brule Paris. Sometimes this is how great works of literature get made. He was chased out of France for Je brule Paris in 1929. He went straight to Leningrad from Paris by ship.
Poland's most untiring Jasieński advocate, Krzysztof Jaworski, suggests in Bruno Jasieński in Paris that this story might have been touched up a bit: Jasieńśki had written positive reviews of Morand's work, a rarity in Jasienski's critical output. Jaworski suggests that the "rage" might have been colored in for effect. But such is the appeal of Wat's story that it retains its hold in the popular imagination.
Jasieński was indeed expelled from France for this novel, and import of the book form (it originally appeared piecemeal in the l'Humanité communist periodical) was forbidden on the grounds that it "exuded blind and stupid hatred for Western European culture." Nor did it increase his popularity in Poland, though in Russia it became a legitimate phenomenon: the first edition of 140,000 copies sold out in a matter of days, prompting a second edition of 220,000 copies.
Small wonder: The book chronicles, in the first part, an unemployed factory worker who is so abused and manhandled by French society that pouring a test tube of the Black plague into the water supply seems the only reasonable solution. In the present section, our protagonist dies in fits and spasms. Then for the last two hundred pages, Paris divides into cultural or political districts (Anglo-Americans/Jews/Chinese/workers/policemen etc.), while all the hate and mistrust latent in such a multicultural society comes bubbling to the surface. By the end Paris, the symbolic heart of Bourgeois culture, is a landscape of corpses.
I Burn Paris remains a reluctantly acknowledged masterpiece in part because of all the ambiguities. The effect comes from following moral impulses so obsessively that they sometimes become their own opposites. The novel marks what is generally thought to be Jasieński's transition from Futurism to Catastrophism. What this means, for example, is that Jasieński's earlier poetry took the staccato rhythm and mechanics of typewriters, trams, factories etc. as their substance, as in the following passage:
The thousands-strong, hundred-street cities pumping out thousands of papers a day, the long black columns of words shouting loud on the boulevards written by little old bespectacled men - wrong - the City writes them stenographing a thousand collisions - in synch, in time, in blood - a hundred thousand camera clicks mark long forty-column epics.[...]power-plant strikes, suicide, adultery, there's your big fat poetry.
- "Song of Hunger," 1922
Compare (from Part One of I Burn Paris, after the protagonist has been thrown in prison):
On the other side of the wall, in the neighboring cramped cells — a strange society of castaways, discarded like waste by the scrupulous, unforgiving machine of the world to this place, behind the high wall on Boulevard Arago and, by someone's inconceivable will, tied and hitched to a new and bizarre mechanism, governed by the new and bizarre laws of the World of Readymade Things. The pointless walks around the symmetrical circles of the courtyard, regular as a carousel, under the low, sooty bell jar of the prison skies. The long rosary, manipulated by some unseen hand, of which each bead is the live, pulsating guts of human existence. The machinery built of cogs that had no place beyond the wall, but which unexpectedly meshed when thrown together in this monstrous lumberyard, clinging to one another and creating a new collective organism, functioning according to a new guiding principle, one scarcely conceived on the other side.
In the novel, the wonderment is gone, the machine has run amok. The pulse in Jasieński's poetry is a mechanical one. It was (remains) shocking for its bold disregard of what this mechanization means, preferring merely to hand us a portrait of the state of things in the modern world, and making a poetry that reflects it. His novel, on the other hand, focuses precisely on the ramifications of this state of things. Yet the recurrence of these images retain some of the young Futurist's fascination for the factory-made man, and his prose holds onto the one-two punch of the poetry's mechanized rhythm. The repetition of such adjectives as "matte" and "flickering" tell us something else: Jasieński's book is an early example of literature with a distinctly cinematic sensibility (Eisenstein is certainly a reference point), a narrative viewed through a camera lens.
A similar ambiguity emerges in Jasieński's treatment of the moral decadence and degradation of his contemporary society, which takes many forms: brothels, child prostitution, racism, grinding poverty, jazz music, the lifestyles of upper classes and bourgeoisie, and so on. Pierre, the novel's initial protagonist (whose death occurs early, in a strangely offhand gesture), appears as a kind of inter-war Candide, stumbling through the dark woods of modern French society, pummeled by its various mechanisms. Of course, in the midst of detailing the horrors that await Pierre in his weird spiral to madness, Jasieński ends up writing passages that very much resemble a decadent novel. Everything is grotesquely bent out of shape, but the sections detailing the revulsion and vileness are, from a literary point of view, some of the most compelling to read. It is a dilemma familiar to the religious painter: Hell is more fun to paint.
Finally, there is a strange and unsolvable contradiction in the fact that a novel which culminates in celebrating the triumphant spread of communism is also a novel whose central motif is the spread of a deadly and unstoppable plague.
None of this is to doubt the sincerity or conviction of Jasieński's aims. The treatment of the Jew by the White Russian officer will seem shockingly prescient to the twenty-first century reader with any knowledge of the Holocaust. The impression is made all the more powerful when one recalls how rare such depictions are in the European literature of the 1920s and 1930s. In his later novella entitled "The Nose" (forthcoming from Twisted Spoon, in The Legs of Izolda Morgan and Other Writings), written in Russian, he offers a rare, if not unique example of a writer with Jewish roots satirizing the sick morality of Nazi Germany before the war broke out. In the present novel, his humane treatment of P'an, the Chinese protagonist, again finds few parallels in the European literature of the time. What remains impressive in I Burn Paris is the fact that, whatever the moral or political status of the character at hand, Jasieński gives him/her full rights to our understanding and sympathy. In this disease-infested Paris everyone may well be cutting everyone else's throats, and the portrait of humanity as it stands might be dismal beyond repair, but as individuals, everyone gets a fair hearing, and a fleshed-out literary existence.
But the ambiguities I have mentioned do seem to suggest that there is a subconscious, or subterranean, life to the narrative, one that goes unacknowledged by the writer as such, but which is perhaps the chief source of discomfort in reading the novel. Whether it is the Futurist undermining the Catastrophist, Jasieński casting doubt on his own best intentions, or a classic case of attraction/repulsion syndrome, it is a tension that runs through much of the book.
We should note in passing that the translator's introduction – surely the most conservative of all arts, save perhaps typography – has undergone a shift in demeanor over the past few decades which is, not surprisingly, reflective of the shift in the so-called art of translating as such. This shift might broadly be defined as one from creative virtuosity to academic fidelity – both approaches with their own drawbacks – and accordingly, the sometimes disarming sincerity and eccentricity of translators' introductions of the 1960s and 1970s has largely given way to introductions that are at best blandly informative, and at worst larded with an academic rhetoric that puts the translator in a position of authority over his subject (i.e. the writer being translated). As I have no intention of playing such shabby tricks with the reader, because I am old-fashioned enough to believe that a translation should be motivated, above all, by a kind of bald enthusiasm for the author at hand, and ultimately, because this particular writer is one of painful, and sometimes uncomfortable honesty, I should like to include the following.
Any introduction to I Burn Paris should explain what I see as the real tragedy of Bruno Jasieński, though I would like to refrain from wringing my hands and gnashing my teeth. The tragedy has less to do with the garden-variety pathos of a highly gifted writer sentenced to death in the vast slaughter of Stalinist Russia (though surely this is tragic enough), than with a more unconventional sort of tragedy: that of an artist pursuing his own delusions to the bitter end. From his earliest poetry, Jasieński was a writer with a powerful sense of his own showmanship and the manufacture of his own identity. This included the monocle he liked to wear, the pseudonym (real name: Wiktor Zysman), affiliation with various literary movements, manifestoes, public statements, rallies, and performances. Even as an aesthetic writer (as opposed to the politically engaged writer he later became), he had an acute sense of creating a persona – the writer himself was viewed as another fictional character. Jasieński's literary voice is seldom, if ever, an intimate one – it is that of a man holding forth from a tribunal or a podium. It is a Romantic impulse, a sign that a writer sees his role as a spokesman for the people (compare: Bruno Schulz's "secretly clasping his reader's hand under the table").
There is a certain inevitability, perhaps, in such writers finding politics. Like many intellectuals of his time, Jasieński was a Marxist. When he found himself expelled from France after the publication of I Burn Paris, the Soviet Union gave him a hero's welcome (a surviving photograph: crowds with banners at the train station, gathered round to greet him). His addresses to the Soviet public maintain the confidence and bluster of his early Futurist manifestoes. That is to say, one has the creeping suspicion that the character of Jasieński the writer (as opposed to Zysman – whoever he was) had not been fundamentally altered, it was only the rhetoric and the vocabulary that had changed. When the purges began in earnest in the 1930s and it became very dangerous to be a public persona, Jasieński had already made a few enemies, and he was soon fighting accusations of being a Polish spy and an enemy of the people. He was arrested on 31 July 1937, and executed on 17 September 1938.
There survive a few of his letters written from captivity directly to Stalin, begging for mercy. In his last letter of many pages, written in self-defense, he lists the shocking tortures he was subjected to (fingernails pulled out, teeth punched out), but just as shockingly, for the first time, we seem to hear Zysman speaking, begging to be allowed to die rather than continue the tortures. Zysman drops all the swagger of his character. And if I am not wholly mistaken, there is a dim recognition of the insanity of having arrived there simply for having played his role - and a confusion at the notion of all this fiction ultimately having such brutal consequences.
by Bruno Jasieński
translated from the Polish
by Soren A. Gauger & Marcin Piekoszewski
I Burn Paris has remained one of Poland's most uncomfortable masterstrokes of literature since its initial and controversial serialization by Henri Barbusse in 1928 in L'Humanité (for which Jasienski was deported for disseminating subversive literature). It tells the story of a disgruntled factory worker who, finding himself on the streets, takes the opportunity to poison Paris's water supply. With the deaths piling up, we encounter Chinese communists, rabbis, disillusioned scientists, embittered Russian émigrés, French communards and royalists, American millionaires and a host of others as the city sections off into ethnic enclaves and everyone plots their route of escape. At the heart of the cosmopolitan city is a deep-rooted xenophobia and hatred — the one thread that binds all these groups together. As Paris is brought to ruin, Jasienski issues a rallying cry to the downtrodden of the world, mixing strains of "The Internationale" with a broadcast of popular music.
With its montage strategies reminiscent of early avant-garde cinema and fist-to-the-gut metaphors, I Burn Paris has lost none of its vitality and vigor. Ruthlessly dissecting various utopian fantasies, Jasienski is out to disorient, and he has a seemingly limitless ability to transform the Parisian landscape into the product of disease-addled minds. An exquisite example of literary Futurism and Catastrophism, the novel presents a filthy, degenerated world where factories and machines have replaced the human and economic relationships have turned just about everyone into a prostitute. Yet rather than cliché and simplistic propaganda, there is an immediacy to the writing, and the modern metropolis is starkly depicted as only superficially cosmopolitan, as hostile and animalistic at its core.
--------
Soren Gauger on Bruno Jasieński
As we speak, one of the few objects in Poland commemorating the life and work of Bruno Jasieński – a high school that bore his name in his hometown of Klimantów – has officially undergone a name change, on the grounds that the writer in question is not "an authority for today's youth" and, indeed, has a "demoralizing effect" on their young minds. Leaving aside the question of the desirability of judging literature on such criteria, what seems most astonishing is that, even now, over seventy years after his torture and execution in a Soviet prison, Jasieński is still such a socially awkward commodity, certain to make English-speaking readers as uncomfortable as Polish ones. Most of the greatest writers seem to have been born at the wrong time, but only a small handful of the truly odd ones feel as though they wouldn't be quite at home – or embraced – at any time.
Bruno Jasieński arrived in Paris in the fall of 1925. In his last surviving statement for the Russian NKVD before his execution, he listed three reasons for leaving Poland: (1) he had graduated from university and was due to serve twenty months of mandatory military service, (2) he was being sued for alleged blasphemy during one of his poetry readings in Lwów (today Lviv, Ukraine), which could have resulted in a year or two in prison, and (3) he was an unemployed literature graduate whose scandalous reputation scarcely promised him work as a high-school teacher. Difficult as it may be to imagine from today's perspective, his poetry readings had been banned by the police in many Polish cities, and on one occasion an audience had even stoned him for his work.
Jasieński intended to learn French and to write novels in his new language. Instead, he immediately enrolled in Chinese and Japanese classes, and wrote freelance articles for the Wiek Nowy newspaper in Lwów. Among other events, he covered the exhumation of famous Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki's remains in Paris and their shipment back to Poland. He also worked as a director at the Polish Workers' Theater, where he staged an adaptation of one of his own poems.
The decision to write I Burn Paris is immortalized in Aleksander Wat's conversations with Czesław Miłosz (My Century):
Wat: [Jasieński's] communism became absolute because of I Burn Paris, with that quarrel over I Burn Paris, when the French authorities expelled him and raised a fuss. I saw how I Burn Paris came about, through his ignorance of the French language. It was like this: Jasieński returned home, I was having dinner at his place, and he started saying with incredible passion and fury that he had seen Morand's latest book in the bookstore, Je brule Moscou. And he was enraged, pacing round the apartment, cursing, unable to calm himself, that Moscow, which he had just... That crook, that fascist...
Miłosz: He didn't understand that bruler means something different: to drive through quickly?
Wat: And three or four days later he was telling me the plot of a novel he wanted to write: Je brule Paris. Sometimes this is how great works of literature get made. He was chased out of France for Je brule Paris in 1929. He went straight to Leningrad from Paris by ship.
Poland's most untiring Jasieński advocate, Krzysztof Jaworski, suggests in Bruno Jasieński in Paris that this story might have been touched up a bit: Jasieńśki had written positive reviews of Morand's work, a rarity in Jasienski's critical output. Jaworski suggests that the "rage" might have been colored in for effect. But such is the appeal of Wat's story that it retains its hold in the popular imagination.
Jasieński was indeed expelled from France for this novel, and import of the book form (it originally appeared piecemeal in the l'Humanité communist periodical) was forbidden on the grounds that it "exuded blind and stupid hatred for Western European culture." Nor did it increase his popularity in Poland, though in Russia it became a legitimate phenomenon: the first edition of 140,000 copies sold out in a matter of days, prompting a second edition of 220,000 copies.
Small wonder: The book chronicles, in the first part, an unemployed factory worker who is so abused and manhandled by French society that pouring a test tube of the Black plague into the water supply seems the only reasonable solution. In the present section, our protagonist dies in fits and spasms. Then for the last two hundred pages, Paris divides into cultural or political districts (Anglo-Americans/Jews/Chinese/workers/policemen etc.), while all the hate and mistrust latent in such a multicultural society comes bubbling to the surface. By the end Paris, the symbolic heart of Bourgeois culture, is a landscape of corpses.
I Burn Paris remains a reluctantly acknowledged masterpiece in part because of all the ambiguities. The effect comes from following moral impulses so obsessively that they sometimes become their own opposites. The novel marks what is generally thought to be Jasieński's transition from Futurism to Catastrophism. What this means, for example, is that Jasieński's earlier poetry took the staccato rhythm and mechanics of typewriters, trams, factories etc. as their substance, as in the following passage:
The thousands-strong, hundred-street cities pumping out thousands of papers a day, the long black columns of words shouting loud on the boulevards written by little old bespectacled men - wrong - the City writes them stenographing a thousand collisions - in synch, in time, in blood - a hundred thousand camera clicks mark long forty-column epics.[...]power-plant strikes, suicide, adultery, there's your big fat poetry.
- "Song of Hunger," 1922
Compare (from Part One of I Burn Paris, after the protagonist has been thrown in prison):
On the other side of the wall, in the neighboring cramped cells — a strange society of castaways, discarded like waste by the scrupulous, unforgiving machine of the world to this place, behind the high wall on Boulevard Arago and, by someone's inconceivable will, tied and hitched to a new and bizarre mechanism, governed by the new and bizarre laws of the World of Readymade Things. The pointless walks around the symmetrical circles of the courtyard, regular as a carousel, under the low, sooty bell jar of the prison skies. The long rosary, manipulated by some unseen hand, of which each bead is the live, pulsating guts of human existence. The machinery built of cogs that had no place beyond the wall, but which unexpectedly meshed when thrown together in this monstrous lumberyard, clinging to one another and creating a new collective organism, functioning according to a new guiding principle, one scarcely conceived on the other side.
In the novel, the wonderment is gone, the machine has run amok. The pulse in Jasieński's poetry is a mechanical one. It was (remains) shocking for its bold disregard of what this mechanization means, preferring merely to hand us a portrait of the state of things in the modern world, and making a poetry that reflects it. His novel, on the other hand, focuses precisely on the ramifications of this state of things. Yet the recurrence of these images retain some of the young Futurist's fascination for the factory-made man, and his prose holds onto the one-two punch of the poetry's mechanized rhythm. The repetition of such adjectives as "matte" and "flickering" tell us something else: Jasieński's book is an early example of literature with a distinctly cinematic sensibility (Eisenstein is certainly a reference point), a narrative viewed through a camera lens.
A similar ambiguity emerges in Jasieński's treatment of the moral decadence and degradation of his contemporary society, which takes many forms: brothels, child prostitution, racism, grinding poverty, jazz music, the lifestyles of upper classes and bourgeoisie, and so on. Pierre, the novel's initial protagonist (whose death occurs early, in a strangely offhand gesture), appears as a kind of inter-war Candide, stumbling through the dark woods of modern French society, pummeled by its various mechanisms. Of course, in the midst of detailing the horrors that await Pierre in his weird spiral to madness, Jasieński ends up writing passages that very much resemble a decadent novel. Everything is grotesquely bent out of shape, but the sections detailing the revulsion and vileness are, from a literary point of view, some of the most compelling to read. It is a dilemma familiar to the religious painter: Hell is more fun to paint.
Finally, there is a strange and unsolvable contradiction in the fact that a novel which culminates in celebrating the triumphant spread of communism is also a novel whose central motif is the spread of a deadly and unstoppable plague.
None of this is to doubt the sincerity or conviction of Jasieński's aims. The treatment of the Jew by the White Russian officer will seem shockingly prescient to the twenty-first century reader with any knowledge of the Holocaust. The impression is made all the more powerful when one recalls how rare such depictions are in the European literature of the 1920s and 1930s. In his later novella entitled "The Nose" (forthcoming from Twisted Spoon, in The Legs of Izolda Morgan and Other Writings), written in Russian, he offers a rare, if not unique example of a writer with Jewish roots satirizing the sick morality of Nazi Germany before the war broke out. In the present novel, his humane treatment of P'an, the Chinese protagonist, again finds few parallels in the European literature of the time. What remains impressive in I Burn Paris is the fact that, whatever the moral or political status of the character at hand, Jasieński gives him/her full rights to our understanding and sympathy. In this disease-infested Paris everyone may well be cutting everyone else's throats, and the portrait of humanity as it stands might be dismal beyond repair, but as individuals, everyone gets a fair hearing, and a fleshed-out literary existence.
But the ambiguities I have mentioned do seem to suggest that there is a subconscious, or subterranean, life to the narrative, one that goes unacknowledged by the writer as such, but which is perhaps the chief source of discomfort in reading the novel. Whether it is the Futurist undermining the Catastrophist, Jasieński casting doubt on his own best intentions, or a classic case of attraction/repulsion syndrome, it is a tension that runs through much of the book.
We should note in passing that the translator's introduction – surely the most conservative of all arts, save perhaps typography – has undergone a shift in demeanor over the past few decades which is, not surprisingly, reflective of the shift in the so-called art of translating as such. This shift might broadly be defined as one from creative virtuosity to academic fidelity – both approaches with their own drawbacks – and accordingly, the sometimes disarming sincerity and eccentricity of translators' introductions of the 1960s and 1970s has largely given way to introductions that are at best blandly informative, and at worst larded with an academic rhetoric that puts the translator in a position of authority over his subject (i.e. the writer being translated). As I have no intention of playing such shabby tricks with the reader, because I am old-fashioned enough to believe that a translation should be motivated, above all, by a kind of bald enthusiasm for the author at hand, and ultimately, because this particular writer is one of painful, and sometimes uncomfortable honesty, I should like to include the following.
Any introduction to I Burn Paris should explain what I see as the real tragedy of Bruno Jasieński, though I would like to refrain from wringing my hands and gnashing my teeth. The tragedy has less to do with the garden-variety pathos of a highly gifted writer sentenced to death in the vast slaughter of Stalinist Russia (though surely this is tragic enough), than with a more unconventional sort of tragedy: that of an artist pursuing his own delusions to the bitter end. From his earliest poetry, Jasieński was a writer with a powerful sense of his own showmanship and the manufacture of his own identity. This included the monocle he liked to wear, the pseudonym (real name: Wiktor Zysman), affiliation with various literary movements, manifestoes, public statements, rallies, and performances. Even as an aesthetic writer (as opposed to the politically engaged writer he later became), he had an acute sense of creating a persona – the writer himself was viewed as another fictional character. Jasieński's literary voice is seldom, if ever, an intimate one – it is that of a man holding forth from a tribunal or a podium. It is a Romantic impulse, a sign that a writer sees his role as a spokesman for the people (compare: Bruno Schulz's "secretly clasping his reader's hand under the table").
There is a certain inevitability, perhaps, in such writers finding politics. Like many intellectuals of his time, Jasieński was a Marxist. When he found himself expelled from France after the publication of I Burn Paris, the Soviet Union gave him a hero's welcome (a surviving photograph: crowds with banners at the train station, gathered round to greet him). His addresses to the Soviet public maintain the confidence and bluster of his early Futurist manifestoes. That is to say, one has the creeping suspicion that the character of Jasieński the writer (as opposed to Zysman – whoever he was) had not been fundamentally altered, it was only the rhetoric and the vocabulary that had changed. When the purges began in earnest in the 1930s and it became very dangerous to be a public persona, Jasieński had already made a few enemies, and he was soon fighting accusations of being a Polish spy and an enemy of the people. He was arrested on 31 July 1937, and executed on 17 September 1938.
There survive a few of his letters written from captivity directly to Stalin, begging for mercy. In his last letter of many pages, written in self-defense, he lists the shocking tortures he was subjected to (fingernails pulled out, teeth punched out), but just as shockingly, for the first time, we seem to hear Zysman speaking, begging to be allowed to die rather than continue the tortures. Zysman drops all the swagger of his character. And if I am not wholly mistaken, there is a dim recognition of the insanity of having arrived there simply for having played his role - and a confusion at the notion of all this fiction ultimately having such brutal consequences.
Vietnam Veteran vs Romney's 4 Deferments
I had a conversation with a 70+ year old Vietnam veteran a couple of weeks ago. I told him, "Romney can't help it - he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth." He replied, "Silver spoon!!! You mean a silver shovel!!!" While Romney was out protesting in favor of the Vietnam war, this veteran was fighting to stay alive in the jungles of southeast Asia. 
Romney on far right protesting in favor of the Vietnam War.
Romney on far right protesting in favor of the Vietnam War.
The Plutocrat & The Equestrian
The 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us. I don't have a problem with their wealth - more power to them. I do however take exception to the fact that I pay more in taxes than these fat cats ...
So Romney made 47% remarks at the home of an investor (Mark Leder) who wrecked a company (Friendly's) to shift its pension obligations to the Federal Government. Why are people surprised? Mittens is a wealthy plutocrat married to a known equestrian ...
Mittens took a $77,000 tax deduction on his wife's horse. Alot of people in this country don't make that kind of money in a year, two years, three years, four years ... You get the point I'm trying to make. In case Mittens hadn't thought of it while he was speaking, which is more often than not, retirees paid for their 'entitlements' long ago, long before he was born.
The majority of seniors who I speak to at the call center are so afraid that Romney/Ryan will turn Medicare into a "voucher" program. Can you blame these poor people?
So Romney made 47% remarks at the home of an investor (Mark Leder) who wrecked a company (Friendly's) to shift its pension obligations to the Federal Government. Why are people surprised? Mittens is a wealthy plutocrat married to a known equestrian ...
The majority of seniors who I speak to at the call center are so afraid that Romney/Ryan will turn Medicare into a "voucher" program. Can you blame these poor people?
Justice Louis D. Brandeis
Pamela Karlan of Stanford Law School, one of the nation's leading voting-rights litigators, reminded a Washington audience a few years ago of Justice Louis D. Brandeis's famous warning against fear. "Men feared witches and burnt women," Brandeis said in a famous dissent. After Crawford, among the first Indiana voters turned away from the polls was a group of nuns in their 80s and 90s.
"We fear terrorists and disfranchise nuns," Karlan said.
"We fear terrorists and disfranchise nuns," Karlan said.
Feeling Better than Ever
It's been 5 months since my last post. My right forearm feels pretty good after my 6th surgery back in May, but I have to be careful with regard to overuse. I'll try to limit my typing, but alot is happening with the upcoming presidential election in November. I'm a volunteer with the Obama campaign. Patience and I canvass door-to-door when my schedule permits. I'm at the call center in Media on Monday and Tuesday nights. The past three weeks I have been going in on Sunday afternoons to make calls. My friends and family ask me, "Arent't you tired?" Sure, I'm tired, but too much is at stake in this election. 
We have come too far after 8 disastrous years under a Republican administration to turn back ... President Bush destroyed our economy and our standing in the world. We can't turn back to the same old same old that got us into this mess in the first place. The majority of Americans continue to trust President Obama on the economy because they have finally come to the realization that voodoo economics (trickle-down theory) just doesn't work. We've been there - done that - which led to the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression. You cannot simultaneously cut taxes and fight two wars without paying for same. It's simple math.
Could things get worse? Yes, under another Republican administration. I wouldn't trust Romney/Ryan with a 10-foot pole when it comes to the economy. I wouldn't trust them on alot of other issues - more on those in another post.
Could things get worse? Yes, under another Republican administration. I wouldn't trust Romney/Ryan with a 10-foot pole when it comes to the economy. I wouldn't trust them on alot of other issues - more on those in another post.
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Voodoo Economics
The banking dominoes will start falling by this summer ...
Rumor is Morgan Stanley - another Lehman Bros in size - has a LOT of exposure to European banks via derivatives. So if there is a run on the European banks - or they just go bust before a run - its 2008 all over again and time for another TARP. Why not? It worked the LAST time, right.
What do you call it when taxpayers are used to bail out Capitalism? Surely not Socialism or Communism and it most certainly cannot be called Capitalism. So that leaves Fascism - using middle class tax money to bail out the upper class as necessary to maintain the status quo ...
The way you get out of a deep recession or depression is spend, current policies of austerity just drive the economic ship into deeper water. And some of you want to drill more and bigger holes in the bottom, idiocy. We have had 35 plus years of voodoo economics, cutting taxes, running up ever greater deficits and we are to get out of it by cutting more taxes, more jobs, again idiocy. Running major wars while cutting taxes, reducing protections against bank speculations and other stupidity, all this is beyond idiocy - it verges on treason. These are in fact, acts of treason, in the name of big business and the criminal class of talking faces owned by their (the wealthy) think tanks and foundations. Ever since Reagan we have been told that if we cut taxes the economy would be the better for it, that the growth in wealth would trickle down, well it does not trickle - it goes to the wealthy and there it sits, more idiocy ...
So all you 'game show host' (Mitt Romney) supporters out there - be it now or a hundred years from now - the trickle will still be 'any day' now ... You have fallen for a con job, your head has run into the same wall over and over and you still believe that the Republicans help the economy ... This goes beyond idiocy into the realm of the moronic.
Rumor is Morgan Stanley - another Lehman Bros in size - has a LOT of exposure to European banks via derivatives. So if there is a run on the European banks - or they just go bust before a run - its 2008 all over again and time for another TARP. Why not? It worked the LAST time, right.
What do you call it when taxpayers are used to bail out Capitalism? Surely not Socialism or Communism and it most certainly cannot be called Capitalism. So that leaves Fascism - using middle class tax money to bail out the upper class as necessary to maintain the status quo ...
So all you 'game show host' (Mitt Romney) supporters out there - be it now or a hundred years from now - the trickle will still be 'any day' now ... You have fallen for a con job, your head has run into the same wall over and over and you still believe that the Republicans help the economy ... This goes beyond idiocy into the realm of the moronic.
End the Fed
Those blaming the working class and the backbone of any economy for the economic woes of the country or for the world for that matter have no clue how money is created and used in our society.
Once a person understands the Federal Reserve and its fractional reserve banking system (if they have half a brain) know it is the most corrupt institution on the planet and it is by design a system that causes economies to fail.
These are the same people who have us playing the Democrat/Republican blame. They keep us in fear, divided, and distracted while they steal our wealth, civil liberties, and security. It is idiotic at best to think if we change parties in the White House that things will change. Our political system has turned into a two-headed one party system serving their masters the banksters/Federal Reserve and Wall Street.
Greece is in trouble like all countries who are tied into the Federal Reserve and their fractional reserve banking system. Greece's troubles started when Goldman Sachs helped them fudge their economic numbers to get into the Euro zone. They went off their currency the Drachma to the Euro which is part of the European Central Bank/Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve system is designed to cause economies to fail and be subservient to them. The Federal Reserve (a group of mostly European banksters) which is neither Federal nor a reserve creates money out of thin air and charges interest on it insuring a debtor economy. Who died and made them the lords of our currency? It was the Federal Reserve Act of 1913!
If someone loans you two dollars to run your economy and expects three back for the loan and interest how are you going to pay the third back? You can’t unless you borrow more dollars which puts you in perpetual debt and in a constant borrowing cycle to pay off the debt. This design is not accidental ...
Here’s the clincher - once the Federal Reserve/banksters have you struggling to pay off your interest, they send in their loan sharks - the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF will loan you money to cover your ever-burdening interest payments but they attach a provision that if you default, you will have to give them your assets in what they call privatization (foreclosure).
Since the interest is exponential, you will default and the banksters will come in and try to foreclose on your country, like Greece (Spain is next ...) They are being told to sell off their own country to pay back the people who caused the mess to begin with. This allows the elite to steal your intrinsic valuable assets because they gave you paper (loans/debt) and the interest on the debt that is systematically impossible to pay back. It has been the corrupt political and business leaders who have made the decisions to allow this to happen. It’s all about greed, power, and corruption folks.
In the United States case, it doesn’t have to be that way. In our constitution, in Article 1, Section 8, it stipulates that we can 'coin money' as a nation and avoid the Federal Reserve’s interest (fee charged on loans) black hole.
The Federal Reserve has a 100 year charter and it is up in 2013. We have to stop these banksters from gaining an extension by our corrupt paid off politicians. If we can stop the extension, we will take control of our currency and our income taxes will drop dramatically! End the Fed!
Once a person understands the Federal Reserve and its fractional reserve banking system (if they have half a brain) know it is the most corrupt institution on the planet and it is by design a system that causes economies to fail.
Greece is in trouble like all countries who are tied into the Federal Reserve and their fractional reserve banking system. Greece's troubles started when Goldman Sachs helped them fudge their economic numbers to get into the Euro zone. They went off their currency the Drachma to the Euro which is part of the European Central Bank/Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve system is designed to cause economies to fail and be subservient to them. The Federal Reserve (a group of mostly European banksters) which is neither Federal nor a reserve creates money out of thin air and charges interest on it insuring a debtor economy. Who died and made them the lords of our currency? It was the Federal Reserve Act of 1913!
If someone loans you two dollars to run your economy and expects three back for the loan and interest how are you going to pay the third back? You can’t unless you borrow more dollars which puts you in perpetual debt and in a constant borrowing cycle to pay off the debt. This design is not accidental ...
Here’s the clincher - once the Federal Reserve/banksters have you struggling to pay off your interest, they send in their loan sharks - the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF will loan you money to cover your ever-burdening interest payments but they attach a provision that if you default, you will have to give them your assets in what they call privatization (foreclosure).
Since the interest is exponential, you will default and the banksters will come in and try to foreclose on your country, like Greece (Spain is next ...) They are being told to sell off their own country to pay back the people who caused the mess to begin with. This allows the elite to steal your intrinsic valuable assets because they gave you paper (loans/debt) and the interest on the debt that is systematically impossible to pay back. It has been the corrupt political and business leaders who have made the decisions to allow this to happen. It’s all about greed, power, and corruption folks.
In the United States case, it doesn’t have to be that way. In our constitution, in Article 1, Section 8, it stipulates that we can 'coin money' as a nation and avoid the Federal Reserve’s interest (fee charged on loans) black hole.
The Federal Reserve has a 100 year charter and it is up in 2013. We have to stop these banksters from gaining an extension by our corrupt paid off politicians. If we can stop the extension, we will take control of our currency and our income taxes will drop dramatically! End the Fed!
Austerity Measures
Everyone in the financial sector knew that the austerity measures put in place by Greece, would not last, they were just buying time to try to force the Central Banks to come up with a new stimulus package; it did not materialize since all the central banks are tapped out, and any more stimulus will send inflation into the stratosphere. I mentioned in an older post there would be riots in the streets of Greece as a result of the austerity measures ... Greece will collapse into a monetary disaster within 6 months, followed by Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy ... Guess who is next?
"Euro zone paymaster Germany has warned there would be 'consequences' to an anti-bailout vote and the EU and IMF insist whoever wins the election must stick to austerity if they want to receive the aid that keeps Greece afloat."
So, the paymaster is demanding that Greece continue "austerity" measures that plunged the country into economic collapse? I don't blame the Greek people for being outraged just as Americans should be outraged at the Republican "austerity" political agenda.
The term "austerity" really means transfer of wealth from citizens to rich barons and corporations. It didn't work in Europe and it won't work in America. Just about any economist knows that you don't cut spending in a depression, quite the opposite is required to spur growth.
Here in America the only reason employment is still high is because Republican governors are cutting government jobs across the nation. The jobs report shows that private sector jobs have made a good rebound and the lackluster jobs numbers reflect steep job cuts in public jobs. This is part of an agenda to undermine government and the economy so they can turn around and blame Obama and the 1% can cash in, yet again.
Let Greece and the rest of Europe be a lesson for those that insist that cutting stimulus will somehow boost growth or cut the deficit - it will do the opposite.
The German banks loaned Greece money so they could afford to buy German products. Its not anybody's fault that THEY decided to scrape the bottom of the barrel for loans but THEIRS ... I hope Greece takes them for every mark they can and THEN goes bust. Why? Because, haven't you heard, greed is GOOD!
"Euro zone paymaster Germany has warned there would be 'consequences' to an anti-bailout vote and the EU and IMF insist whoever wins the election must stick to austerity if they want to receive the aid that keeps Greece afloat."
So, the paymaster is demanding that Greece continue "austerity" measures that plunged the country into economic collapse? I don't blame the Greek people for being outraged just as Americans should be outraged at the Republican "austerity" political agenda.
The term "austerity" really means transfer of wealth from citizens to rich barons and corporations. It didn't work in Europe and it won't work in America. Just about any economist knows that you don't cut spending in a depression, quite the opposite is required to spur growth.
Here in America the only reason employment is still high is because Republican governors are cutting government jobs across the nation. The jobs report shows that private sector jobs have made a good rebound and the lackluster jobs numbers reflect steep job cuts in public jobs. This is part of an agenda to undermine government and the economy so they can turn around and blame Obama and the 1% can cash in, yet again.
Let Greece and the rest of Europe be a lesson for those that insist that cutting stimulus will somehow boost growth or cut the deficit - it will do the opposite.
The German banks loaned Greece money so they could afford to buy German products. Its not anybody's fault that THEY decided to scrape the bottom of the barrel for loans but THEIRS ... I hope Greece takes them for every mark they can and THEN goes bust. Why? Because, haven't you heard, greed is GOOD!
Bye Bye Sarkozy!
President Nicolas Sarkozy just told his supporters in an address that he called François Hollande to congratulate the Socialist candidate on his victory.
France has crowned Hollande as its first Socialist president in nearly two decades, marking a swing to the left at the heart of Europe and heralding a fight-back against German-led austerity.
Conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy, swamped by anger at a surge in unemployment during his five-year term, is the 11th euro zone leader to be swept away by the European economic crisis.
France has crowned Hollande as its first Socialist president in nearly two decades, marking a swing to the left at the heart of Europe and heralding a fight-back against German-led austerity.
Conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy, swamped by anger at a surge in unemployment during his five-year term, is the 11th euro zone leader to be swept away by the European economic crisis.
Homeless Greeks
The homeless begging in Greece ...
Since the first memorandum vote and the introduction of austerity measures, more and more people now live on the street. The number of desperate, unemployed, homeless and/or drug addicted people has increased. The economic crisis has become a social crisis ...
Since the first memorandum vote and the introduction of austerity measures, more and more people now live on the street. The number of desperate, unemployed, homeless and/or drug addicted people has increased. The economic crisis has become a social crisis ...
Greeks and French rise up!
You can push people only so far before they rise up ... What is remarkable about both the French and Greek elections is that people are voting against their parties. Greeks are voting for leftists parties because they have had it with the two parties who have been in power for over 50 years - New Democracy and PASOK. The French backed the socialist Hollande because they have had enough ...
Greeks hope Hollande will bring change in Europe. Not surprising since the German agenda is deeply unpopular across Europe. A 72-year old lady voted in both the French and Greek elections. "Enough is enough. There is too much austerity," 72-year old Maria said as she cast a ballot for Socialist Francois Hollande at the French consulate in Athens, before heading to a Greek polling station to back a leftist party.
Like many Greeks angered by the economic hardship imposed in exchange for an international bailout, the bi-national pensioner hopes Hollande will turn Europe away from a German-led agenda focused tightly on cutting debt.
That agenda made Germany extremely unpopular and pushed voters in Greece's parallel poll today away from the two biggest parties, which support the bailout, and towards a host of small groups opposing it.
Wouldn't it be nice to hear Hollande's first phonen call to Merkel!
Greeks hope Hollande will bring change in Europe. Not surprising since the German agenda is deeply unpopular across Europe. A 72-year old lady voted in both the French and Greek elections. "Enough is enough. There is too much austerity," 72-year old Maria said as she cast a ballot for Socialist Francois Hollande at the French consulate in Athens, before heading to a Greek polling station to back a leftist party.
Like many Greeks angered by the economic hardship imposed in exchange for an international bailout, the bi-national pensioner hopes Hollande will turn Europe away from a German-led agenda focused tightly on cutting debt.
That agenda made Germany extremely unpopular and pushed voters in Greece's parallel poll today away from the two biggest parties, which support the bailout, and towards a host of small groups opposing it.
Wouldn't it be nice to hear Hollande's first phonen call to Merkel!
Wall Street - All Eyes on European Elections
After Wall Street's worst week of the year, U.S. stock investors will now be taking a closer look at the election outcomes in Greece and France.
Markets worldwide have closely watched developments in Europe for the past several months, with calls for austerity seen as positive for stocks as they seek to prevent a credit crisis in the region that could take down or deeply hurt the global economic recovery.
But an economic slowdown throughout the region has resulted in a change of direction.
Hollande's win now is a hurdle to the German-led drive for austerity in Europe. The French voters have spoken ...
Markets worldwide have closely watched developments in Europe for the past several months, with calls for austerity seen as positive for stocks as they seek to prevent a credit crisis in the region that could take down or deeply hurt the global economic recovery.
But an economic slowdown throughout the region has resulted in a change of direction.
Hollande's win now is a hurdle to the German-led drive for austerity in Europe. The French voters have spoken ...
French Elections 2012
Flunked Euro history? Maybe we will relive it - Golden Dawn leader Michaloliakos warns: "Be afraid, we're coming." The fascists are coming to France too ...
Breaking News: Hollande beats Sarkozy by 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent in French runoff vote: Harris Institute Projection ...
Socialist Francois Hollande can expect a left-wing parliamentary majority. Why? Because the far-right National Front has shaken Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative UMP party to its foundations!
Voters will grant Hollande a working majority in legislative elections on June 10 and 17, as they have each time a new president has been installed.
Sarkozy's UMP party, the dominant force in French politics for a decade, cracked under pressure from a resurgent far-right as factions feud over whether to shun or embrace backers of Marine Le Pen's anti-immigration National Front (FN).
Xenophobia in France ... It's amazing how history has a way of repeating itself.
Panic in the streets of Greece ... Panic in the streets of France ...
Breaking News: Hollande beats Sarkozy by 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent in French runoff vote: Harris Institute Projection ...
Socialist Francois Hollande can expect a left-wing parliamentary majority. Why? Because the far-right National Front has shaken Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative UMP party to its foundations!
Voters will grant Hollande a working majority in legislative elections on June 10 and 17, as they have each time a new president has been installed.
Sarkozy's UMP party, the dominant force in French politics for a decade, cracked under pressure from a resurgent far-right as factions feud over whether to shun or embrace backers of Marine Le Pen's anti-immigration National Front (FN).
Xenophobia in France ... It's amazing how history has a way of repeating itself.
Panic in the streets of Greece ... Panic in the streets of France ...
Golden Dawn (Nea Avgi) - 1936 again?
I came, I saw, I beat the shit out of anyone who looked different. Veni, videi, vici screams Golden Dawn leader in press conference ... Shame on you shithead. Xenophobia is introduced in my beloved country. The circus has come to town in Greece ...
(3 May 2012: Waiting at a bus stop in the center of Athens, an African immigrant looks at the political advertisement of one of the two far right parties.)
Entry of neofascist Golden Dawn into Parliament is a shock but was not entirely unexpected. With a 50% unemployment rate in Greece among 18 to 54 year olds what did they expect?
So the Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party is set to get 14-23 seats in Greece's 300 seat parliament. The biggest shock is SYRIZA beating PASOK into 2nd place and likely to make a New Democracy - PASOK coalition government a no-no ... If there is no clear outcome, Greece has until May 17th to form an interim government or call a second election.
What I find very troubling though is that half of Europe is blaming foreigners for it's troubles. It was wrong in 1936 when Hitler came to power and it's wrong in 2012. History is repeating itself again ...
We will have to see what happens in Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Italy. The euro and EU are going down when Spain goes bust so why not get out now and start anew sooner rather than later. Rumor has it a Spain default is inevitable as their banks get downgraded and tax revenues fall further due to recession, austerity measures and deflation.
At this point, Greece's election is an indication of what's in the horizon for pro-austerity parties across Europe.
Looking forward to the results of France's election (the numbers) ... bye-bye Sarkozy!!!
(3 May 2012: Waiting at a bus stop in the center of Athens, an African immigrant looks at the political advertisement of one of the two far right parties.)
Entry of neofascist Golden Dawn into Parliament is a shock but was not entirely unexpected. With a 50% unemployment rate in Greece among 18 to 54 year olds what did they expect?
So the Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party is set to get 14-23 seats in Greece's 300 seat parliament. The biggest shock is SYRIZA beating PASOK into 2nd place and likely to make a New Democracy - PASOK coalition government a no-no ... If there is no clear outcome, Greece has until May 17th to form an interim government or call a second election.
What I find very troubling though is that half of Europe is blaming foreigners for it's troubles. It was wrong in 1936 when Hitler came to power and it's wrong in 2012. History is repeating itself again ...
We will have to see what happens in Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Italy. The euro and EU are going down when Spain goes bust so why not get out now and start anew sooner rather than later. Rumor has it a Spain default is inevitable as their banks get downgraded and tax revenues fall further due to recession, austerity measures and deflation.
At this point, Greece's election is an indication of what's in the horizon for pro-austerity parties across Europe.
Looking forward to the results of France's election (the numbers) ... bye-bye Sarkozy!!!
Greek Elections 2012
It's now just after 5 pm in Greece and within a couple of hours the voting will have finished and the first exit polls will be published. Unlike many other elections the outcome of today's vote is far from clear. The largest party is most likely to be the conservative New Democracy with about 20-25%. This is in sharp contrast to the 2009 national elections in which New Democracy and PASOK got the lion share of the vote with 78% combined, reflecting the stranglehold they have had over power since the late 70's.
(A rally for the candidate of the New Democracy party, Antonis Samaras, who is likely to head a coalition government as prime minister.)
Our Greek flag held by thousands of Greeks at New Democracy rallies. Where is the Greek flag at the leftist rallies?
On the other hand many other smaller parties are picking up support from disgruntled New Democracy/PASOK voters and that is really the joker in the pack, threatening to overturn the political status quo that was created in the aftermath of the fall of brutal Regime of the Colonels in 1974. Some parties such as the rightist Independent Greeks are new creations whilst others such as the Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn have a longer, if more savage lineage, either way they are attracting votes at a rate that would have been inconceivable even a couple of years ago.
On the left of the spectrum the old school communist party KKE has gained ground as have other leftist parties such as The Radical Left (SYRIZA) and the newly minted Democratic Left with some estimates saying their combined share of the vote may pass 40%. The one thing that unites such disparate groups is their opposition to the austerity package imposed by Greece's creditors, however what else could possibly bring them together remains a mystery.
I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and say that I believe that the polls will produce a three party coalition government including PASOK, New Democracy and possibly Independent Greeks party. I base this prediction on nothing more than a hunch and past experience of Greek politics. The thing to remember when analyzing politics in Greece is that ideological labels often count for little when power is concerned and so a coalition will be based on mutually aligned interests rather than political overlap.
If such an alliance does take power I believe that it is destined to fall apart as the political cost of yet more job cuts and tax hikes takes its toll. So quite possibly Greece will be going to the polls once more before September.
(A rally for the candidate of the New Democracy party, Antonis Samaras, who is likely to head a coalition government as prime minister.)
Our Greek flag held by thousands of Greeks at New Democracy rallies. Where is the Greek flag at the leftist rallies?
On the other hand many other smaller parties are picking up support from disgruntled New Democracy/PASOK voters and that is really the joker in the pack, threatening to overturn the political status quo that was created in the aftermath of the fall of brutal Regime of the Colonels in 1974. Some parties such as the rightist Independent Greeks are new creations whilst others such as the Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn have a longer, if more savage lineage, either way they are attracting votes at a rate that would have been inconceivable even a couple of years ago.
On the left of the spectrum the old school communist party KKE has gained ground as have other leftist parties such as The Radical Left (SYRIZA) and the newly minted Democratic Left with some estimates saying their combined share of the vote may pass 40%. The one thing that unites such disparate groups is their opposition to the austerity package imposed by Greece's creditors, however what else could possibly bring them together remains a mystery.
I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and say that I believe that the polls will produce a three party coalition government including PASOK, New Democracy and possibly Independent Greeks party. I base this prediction on nothing more than a hunch and past experience of Greek politics. The thing to remember when analyzing politics in Greece is that ideological labels often count for little when power is concerned and so a coalition will be based on mutually aligned interests rather than political overlap.
If such an alliance does take power I believe that it is destined to fall apart as the political cost of yet more job cuts and tax hikes takes its toll. So quite possibly Greece will be going to the polls once more before September.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Getting By
We stuff our credit cards deeper into the drawer. We lose our jobs and call it "going freelance." We lie to our parents and tell them we still have health insurance. We see protesters mingle with people who have been without a home or a job for a long time - a really long time - and we wonder if they're on the same spectrum. We don't ask that question out loud. We respect that everyone has a side hustle. A side hustle to the side hustle. Survival, we come to realize, is its own form of activism. We buy less crap. We make dinner at home. We hold out hope that our projects will become paychecks. We share. We rely on each other. We get through it together.
Monday, April 23, 2012
Oughts and Shoulds
She craves attention because she is large, yes, she is big. I am mocking her size (I am not thin, but then again I am not incredibly obese). Yes, she is obese, but it has taken me some time to finally realize how 'small' this person really is. She is full of contradictions and is infected with misery. Her attachment to her isolated existence is a manifestation of her fear of happiness. Unfortunately, 'unhappy' in this person's life has virtue attached to it. Failed relationships, multiple breakdowns, suicide attempts - it is not happiness that she should crave, but the pursuit of it. The chase is the aim.
The King James version of the Bible appeared in the same year as the first advertised performance of The Tempest. This is what I tell people who feel the need to tell me how 'good' so-and-so is ... Please - give me a break! Didn't you attempt to kill yourself because of this crass individual! (See The Façade.) Married, divorced, and then remarried to the same man again (part of the working-class men who want their women at home) - by your own admission 'for financial reasons' ... There is nothing wrong with marrying your ex again, but don't bitch non-stop about how he makes you sick. You're tired of his bullshit. You were tired when you were married to him the first time around, what made you think things would be different the second time?
Happiness is not a luxury, or an option, or for a select few people in this world. Happiness is a state of mind. Get the hell out of the house and do something! It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place. Break out of the predictable confines of your existence - rid yourself of "oughts" and "musts" and "shoulds" - live everyday as if it will be your last. Doing the same things every day, repeating the same routines day after day, worrying about the future (that isn't here yet), etc. is not going to make you feel better.
I know what it feels like to be depressed. It prevents you from enjoying and living your life to the fullest, it affects your mood, enthusiasm - you miss out on the sun, the moon, the stars, the sky, etc. Please don't make excuses. It is what it is. It shouldn't take you a whole weekend to wash two dishes ... it was Friday when you mentioned your cousin passed away (not Wednesday). Losing all sense of time (not knowing what day it is) ...
It helps to look at depression as a gift because it forces you to work on yourself ...
The King James version of the Bible appeared in the same year as the first advertised performance of The Tempest. This is what I tell people who feel the need to tell me how 'good' so-and-so is ... Please - give me a break! Didn't you attempt to kill yourself because of this crass individual! (See The Façade.) Married, divorced, and then remarried to the same man again (part of the working-class men who want their women at home) - by your own admission 'for financial reasons' ... There is nothing wrong with marrying your ex again, but don't bitch non-stop about how he makes you sick. You're tired of his bullshit. You were tired when you were married to him the first time around, what made you think things would be different the second time?
Happiness is not a luxury, or an option, or for a select few people in this world. Happiness is a state of mind. Get the hell out of the house and do something! It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place. Break out of the predictable confines of your existence - rid yourself of "oughts" and "musts" and "shoulds" - live everyday as if it will be your last. Doing the same things every day, repeating the same routines day after day, worrying about the future (that isn't here yet), etc. is not going to make you feel better.
I know what it feels like to be depressed. It prevents you from enjoying and living your life to the fullest, it affects your mood, enthusiasm - you miss out on the sun, the moon, the stars, the sky, etc. Please don't make excuses. It is what it is. It shouldn't take you a whole weekend to wash two dishes ... it was Friday when you mentioned your cousin passed away (not Wednesday). Losing all sense of time (not knowing what day it is) ...
It helps to look at depression as a gift because it forces you to work on yourself ...
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